It's all in the anticipation

Abstract

Since the beginnings of character animation, anticipation has been an effective part of the repertoire of tricks used to create believable animated characters. However, anticipation has had but a secondary role in the creation of synthetic virtual life forms. In this paper, we describe how a simple anticipatory mechanism that generates an affective signal resulting from the mismatch between sensed and predicted values -the emotivector - can help in the creation of consistent believable behaviour for intelligent virtual characters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.